


aesthetic observance of violence

by Anonymous



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Assassins & Hitmen, Character Death, Gen, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Nonlinear Narrative, Revenge, extreme loss and how not to deal with it, listen bro this shit came to me on the brink of exhaustion, vague kill bill au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-07
Updated: 2018-03-07
Packaged: 2019-03-27 17:42:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13885854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Keith put Shiro down flat on his back in the gym and Shiro blinked up at him like he had an epiphany from God himself and then Keith fell in love with him, and maybe that is where they went wrong.(The one shining thought in the pit of anxiety growing in his chest, is that he knows exactly who did this to him. He also thinks that if they were smart, they would’ve made sure he was actually dead.)or: a vaguely kill bill-esque au because self-restraint who?





	aesthetic observance of violence

**Author's Note:**

> i truly have no idea what this is. i woke up on sunday like 'a beatrix kiddo revenge story full of cool swords but with keith' thinking it was the best idea in the world, and now i'm here. if someone looked me in the eye a year and a half ago and told me i would write a kill bill inspired au for a reboot of a cartoon i used to watch, i.....probably would have believed them. im a mess.
> 
> read the tags, there's character death (obviously) and the whole concept of revenge taken to the max, so be careful if tht's not your cup of tea

 

_ i. i am moved by fancies that are curled around these images, and cling: _

_ the notion of some infinitely gentle,  infinitely suffering thing _

 

It takes a while to find an actual pastor who’s willing to ratify the marriage. Every time one gets that  _ look _ on their face or  _ politely _ refuses, Keith gets the very strong urge to deck them in he face, but Takashi always stops him with a gentle hand on his shoulder and an apologetic smile. They do find one, eventually, a kind surprisingly old little man from not around here. He has a nice little wife, too, who coos at them and tells Keith he’s very lucky to have snagged such a fine young man. Keith smiles and tells her he knows. 

It won’t be anything big, the wedding. It’ll be at this tiny little church, wooden and out in the middle of nowhere like something out of an old western. Lance makes some crack about the old shack Keith used to live in when they go to check it out and says he must feel right at home.  Keith tells him to shut it, but he’s too happy to put anything into it.   
  
There won’t be a lot of people there, and it won’t be very fancy, but they both have some very nice suits and a whole lot of enthusiasm to make up for it. A day or two before the actual wedding, they do a little run through of it. Keith thinks a wedding rehearsal is a stupid idea, but Allura tells him people do it all the time. They spend most of the time straightening up the little details, anyways.   
  
“You’ll want a first dance, of course,” the old pastor’s old wife is saying.  
  
“Of course,” Takashi agrees with a smile.   
  
“I can’t dance,” Keith complains, but Takashi just ruffles his hair a little.  
  
“Neither can I, it’ll be fun.”  
  
The pastor’s wife smiles at them the way she did when she was telling them how cute they are together. “We have a piano in the back we can pull in here.”   
  
“Ooh, ooh,” Hunk leans forwards, raising his hand, “I can play piano. I’m considered to be very good at it, in fact.” He’s been speaking overly-proper since they walked through the church doors, because he’s ridiculous.   
  
“I didn’t know you could play,” Keith says, leaning back to look at him.  
  
Hunk smiles, “Lessons when I was little. Stopped a few years in cause my teacher moved.”   
  
“Cool.”   
  
“Very,” he agrees playfully, “I can play whatever song you like.”  
  
“How ‘bout Take Me To Church?” Takashi asks, because he likes to think he’s funny.  
  
Hunk grins, “No, I do not know that one. Actually now that I think about it, the only songs I really know how to play are _She’s Always A Woman,_ _Just The Way You Are_ by Bruno Mars, and the intro to _Past Lives.”_  
  
“Only the into?” Lance asks behind him.  
  
“Only the intro.”  
  
“Why not learn the rest of the song?”  
  
Hunk shrugs, “It gets into that weird techno beat stuff and I just wasn’t feeling it.”  
  
“ _Just The Way You Are_ could work,” Takashi says.   
  
Keith laughs disbelievingly. “You want our first dance to be to a Bruno Mars song?”  
  
“The man’s a legend”, Takashi defends, “ _She’s Always A Woman_ is a nice song, but you are definitely not a woman, and we can’t dance to one intro over and over again.”  
  
“It’s a nice intro,” Hunk says. “I think I know the rift to _Only The Good Die Young._ ”  
  
Pidge flicks him in the back of the head, “You don’t wanna sing about death at a wedding, man. It’s probably bad luck.”   
  
“Nah, it’d basically be like singing about how they’re both gonna live forever.” Lance says. Pidge flicks him, too. Quietly, Keith agrees with him. He is not a good person, and he hasn’t died yet.   
  
Instead of saying this, he sighs dramatically instead, leaning into Takashi’s side, “Bruno Mars it is, I guess.”   
  
Takashi laughs that amazing laugh of his, and tilts Keith’s head back so he can press a quick kiss to his lips.   
  
“The seating arrangements,” the pastor says once the chatter has died down again. “We usually have the bride’s—well in this case the groom’s family on one side and the other groom’s on the other side, but seeing as how…” here, he glances at Keith, who shifts self consciously, “Seeing as how neither groom has any family to speak of, we thought all of the… guests could share the seating.”  
  
Lance scoffs, “Listen, man, we’re all the family these two dorks’ll ever need. Far as you’re concerned, both groom’s families will be sitting together.”   
  
The pastor blinks a bit, but concedes. Lance has that effect on people. Keith sends him a grateful smile.   
  
“Is Matt coming?” Takshi asks.  
  
Pidge nods, “He’s bringing my dad, too.”  
  
“Allura and Coran are coming too, obviously,” Lance adds. “Coran’s gonna cry so much.”  
  
“You’re gonna cry so much,” Pidge says.   
  
Lance squawks. “Not as much as you.”  
  
“Not as much as Keith, more like,” Takashi says.   
  
Keith shoves him lightly, “Shut up,” he says, because it’s true, but he’s smiling, and Takashi just pulls him closer. Keith is happy.   
  
(He does cry, through, at the wedding. It’s for all the wrong reasons. Takashi’s lifeless eyes stare at him and all he hears before the world goes black is someone laughing, and a gunshot.) 

  
  
He tracks down Narti first.   
  
She’s the easiest to find, because she’s dead. Killed in the line of duty, probably. He’s heard a bunch of stories—that her fucking cat finally turned on her and scratched the rest of her face up, or that she turned out to be a spy and Lotor killed her himself. He doesn’t particularly care. He’s just disappointed he couldn’t be the one to do it himself.   
  
She’s buried in a little cemetery in some remote town a few miles away from the coast of the Atlantic. He visits in the fall, when the air is cold and the leaves are brown and just as dead as she is.    
  
She has her name on the headstone, but only her first one. Last name is a fake, of course. Keith’s had so many last names he’s forgotten what his first one was. He’ll never forget the one that was stolen away before he could make it his own.   
  
He stares down at the grass that’s started to grow over the place she was buried. If he had to guess what did her in, he’d bet it was Lotor. He couldn’t even keep her around long enough for Keith to kill her, the bastard. Asshole always did like taking things away from Keith.   
  
“I hope it hurt,” he says to the headstone and the grass and the body buried six feet under. The words fall to the ground and sink down. He hopes she hears them.    
  
He spits on the grave, and walks away.    
  
He crosses her name, unfortunately, off the list. Five to go. Maybe six, if he’s lucky.    
  
He thinks he’ll find Zethrid next. He likes to get big threats out of the way before he focuses on the real ones. 

  
  
He’s barely alive when the cops find him. At least that’s what they tell him. He wasn’t actually conscious for any of it.   
  
They tell him that everyone else who attended was dead—the pastor and his wife and Hunk and Allura and—and that it was a fucking massacre. Looked like something straight out of a Tarantino movie. The groom lying dead at the altar. They found Keith lying in the middle of it, arm outstretched like he was reaching for Takashi, that nice looking man, with his dying breath.    
  
He was, but it wasn’t quite his dying one. He came close. Close enough that they almost ruled him as dead and stuffed him in a body bag, too. They stuff him in a hospital instead, because he’s not dead but he’s not awake and no one knows who the fuck he is anyways because he did his very best to make it that way.    
  
They wait for him to wake up, so they can ask him about it.    
  
They had to wait four years, and he makes sure no one has the chance to ask him shit.   
  
  
He wakes up the the sound of a gunshot ringing in his ears.    
  
He gasps, choking on the air he breathes in too fast. Vaguely, he hears his heart monitor beeping like crazy. Hospital, he thinks. He’s in a hospital. Which also means he’s alive. He grabs his own arm and digs his nails in hard to center himself, to get his breathing under control.    
  
It’s nighttime, he sees, glancing at the window. No one comes running at the sound of his fucking heart attack. He’s in the hospital. Why is he in the hospital? He stopped going on missions years ago, hasn’t been in one of these beds since he almost got his leg blown off in Italy. Why is he in the hospital? Why is he alone? Where’s—he forces himself up, looking frantically around the empty room. Where’s Shiro? Where’s Takashi?    
  
He thinks of a church, and a suit, and Hunk playing the piano. He thinks of lifeless eyes staring at him.  _ Oh god, _ he thinks, and turns and vomits into the trash can near the side of the bed. There’s hardly anything coming up, but his body tries its best. Oh  _ god _ .   
  
He coughs, head spinning. Shiro is—Takashi is—Takashi is dead. He’s dead. He’s dead he’s dead he was killed, Hunk and Lance and Pidge and Matt and Allura and Takashi and the last thing he remembers is a gunshot so why is he still alive?    
  
The room is empty, and all he can think is that he does not want to be alive. Everyone he loves in the world is dead. He does not want to be alive.    
  
He doesn’t know how long he sits there, hands clutching at his empty chest, wishing he was dead. All he knows is that when he looks up again, the sun is barely peeking its head up from beyond the horizon, and Keith is fucking hungry. He ignores it.    
  
More importantly, he hears the hospital start to come to life again. There is the sound of shoes clicking on tile floor, and he’s lying back in his bed and shutting his eyes tight right before the door to his room opens.    
  
He feels eyes on him, and lies very still, forcing his breath even. He’s played dead before. He can play being asleep.    
  
Machines beep and paper rustle as the person fiddles with things Keith can’t see. The person—the man—hums a little bit, checking something off.    
  
“Still asleep, huh?” The man asks, like it’s something he asks everyday. A coma, then? Keith wonders.    
  
The man hums again, suddenly sounding much closer. Keith feels the sheets being smoothed down, the drag of long, cool fingers on his shoulder and his neck and his cheek. He has to force himself not to snap them in half. Instead, his heart rate picks up just a bit.   
  
“Getting excited, are we?” The man asks, a smile in his voice. “Pretty thing like you, don’t deserve to waste your life away here. Least I get to see you.”    
  
Keith can feel the mans breath on his face. He man’s cold fingers prod at his mouth. He slips one in, and then two.    
  
Keith bites down hard.    
  
He feels something crack, the man screams, and Keith doesn’t let go until the man is begging and the blood in his mouth is too nasty to handle anymore. He spits it out, and it splatters all over the sheets.     
  
The man tries to run, but Keith catches his arm before he can. He reels a bit at the sudden movement, but manages to twist the asshole’s arm back and back and back and growl, “Where the fuck am I?”   
  
The man whimpers out the name of some hospital he’s never heard of.    
  
“How long have I been here?”   
  
“I don’t—I wasn’t—I, I just started working here a few years ago, I don’t—“   
  
“I didn’t ask how long you’ve been here,” he says, twisting his arm back further. I asked how long I’ve been in this goddamn bed.”

“I, please, I,” The man gasps, “About four years, I think? That’s what it said in your, in your file.”   
  
“You spend a lot of time in my file?” Keith scoffs to distract himself from the sinking feeling in his chest. Four years.    
  
“No,” The man says quickly; Keith can feel his heart beating fast and frantic, like he’s the one hooked up to a heart monitor, “No, no, I just, I was just doing my job.”    
  
It’s the wrong thing to say, and they both know it. Keith clamps a hand over the mans mouth as his arm breaks.    
  
“Give me your keys,” he growls, using the man’s distraction to rip out the IVs in his arms. He tries to swing his legs over the side of the bed, but they don’t. Move. Fuck, he thinks. Four year coma. “Give me your car keys,” he says again, grabbing a syringe from the table next to the bed and holding against his neck in warning.    
  
The man gives him his car keys. He also kicks a wheelchair from the far side of the room over to the bed, and then runs. Keith cusses. He doesn’t have much time now.    
  
The amount of willpower it takes to get from the bed and into the stupid wheelchair is incredible. It borders on ridiculous, he thinks, stuffing the keys and the syringe between his thighs as he rolls down the hallway. Fucking coma. Fucking legs. He hates hospitals. God, he hopes he’s going the right way.    
  
He almost runs into a nurse as he turns a corner, and just barely remembers to throw an apology over his shoulder. She yells something after him, but he turns another corner and it’s forgotten. He manages to grab a scalpel from a tray of tools outside someone’s room, and snags a towel he drapes over his legs so he doesn’t attract too much attention from wearing one singular hospital gown and nothing else. He’s found that if you act like you’re supposed to be somewhere and you’re confident enough in your acting, people tend to believe you. He’s lucky it’s early, and it’s not nearly as busy as it gets during the day.    
  
Somehow, running on adrenaline and fear and maybe some help from a higher power, he makes it to the parking garage. One hand on a wheel and the other clicking the lock button on the keys over and over again, he finds the creepy ass nurse’s truck. It’s a mediocre thing, but unnoticeable. As much as Keith likes nice cars, he does not want to be noticed.    
  
He pries the back door open and uses the safety handles to pull himself up and into the car. It takes him a solid eight minutes, and he almost slips and falls three times before he manages to drape himself across the backseat and pull the door shut behind him.    
  
God, he thinks, lying back against the window.    
  
The sun is coming up for real by now, pouring in through the windshield. He has to close his eyes against the light. Instead, he puts a hand up to shield it away, and looks down at his legs. They lay there, useless, and stare back at him.     
  
Four years, he thinks. He hasn’t moved his legs in four years.    
  
Fucking coma.    
  
The one shining thought in the pit of anxiety growing in his chest, is that he knows exactly who did this to him.    
He also thinks that if they were smart, they would’ve made sure he was actually dead.

 

Five years ago, and Takashi says they should run away.

“What?” Keith breathes, whispers into the skin of his neck in the dark, “Are you crazy?”

“Come on Keith, think about it.”

“Think about what, all the different ways they would kill us?”

“No,” he huffs something between a laugh and a sigh, “Think about leaving. About not being here anymore. I know what this is doing to you.”

Keith frowns, “It’s a job. I’m doing my job.”

“It’s killing you.”

“It’s killing  _ you, _ ” he hisses back, “If you want to go, at least be honest with me about why.”

Shiro—Takashi, he reminds himself, he’s always Takashi when they’re together like this—ducks his head down like he’s guilty. “I’m sorry,” he says against his skin. “It’s killing us both.”

Keith shake his head, “You’ve always been a better person than me. This job won’t kill me.”

“That’s not true,” Takashi insists, “You’re better than you know, Keith. You’re amazing. You’re—you’re everything.”

Keith turns his head away to hide the way he flushes, even though no one can see it, “You’re only saying that ‘cause I saved your ass yesterday.”

“And every other time,” he agrees, smiling. “I don’t know where I’d be without you.”

“Dead,” Keith says, and they laugh, like it’s a joke, even though it’s true. Shiro— _ Takashi  _ almost died yesterday. If Keith hadn’t kicked him out of the way of, he would’ve ended up painted all over the road. Keith did kick him out of the way, and it led to whole frantic, adrenaline-fueled, oh god you almost died kind of make out, all hands and teeth, that they were so used to. You’d think it was a mission tradition. 

“You almost died,” he says, softer this time. 

“But I didn’t,” Takashi says, “I’m still here, thanks to you.” 

Keith shakes his head, painfully honest in the early hours of the morning, “I don’t know what I would do without you,” he admits. “I don’t know who I would be without you.” 

He feels Takashi’s hands, warm and big and calloused, against his face. “Keith,” he says, whispers, Keith looks up at him, can barely see him through the dark. He’s beautiful, even like this. “Let’s leave.”

Keith thinks about Takashi painting the asphalt bright red.

They leave.

 

He finds Zethrid in France. 

It’s funny, Keith thinks, tapping his fingers against the arm rest to the beat of a song, he never took her for a European kind of person. He stares out the plane window, looking down on the Eiffel Tower, all of the tiny people running around because they still have lives to live and people that they love. 

He thinks about throwing her off the very top of the Tower, and decides against it only because it would be too much work. 

He doesn’t know Zethrid’s real name. He didn’t know Narti’s, either, until he saw her headstone. Lotor’s little group —called themselves  _ generals, _ like they were part of an army instead of a group of assassins who killed for money— had the most interesting codenames. He and Shiro and Matt, sometimes, used to make bets on what they meant. Matt thought maybe spun a wheel and put random shit together until it sounded cool. Shiro thought maybe they were anagrams of their actual names. Keith thought they didn’t mean shit, like how people sometimes called him Red cause he said he liked the color maybe once and had a red bike helmet, like how they called Shiro the Champion cause he beat all of them at arm wrestling every single time.

Once, Matt had tried to look up what it meant, whether it was a real word or not. It wasn’t, surprise surprise, and when he tried to look up the meaning on a baby name website, it asked him what it meant, and then gave him ‘their best guess’. 

“Z is for  _ zest _ ,” he remembers Matt reading out loud, laughter in his voice, “your zeal for life. E is for enthusiasm, even in the most dire circumstances. T is for  _ touching, _ ” here, he’d burst out laughing, and Ezor had to grab the laptop before it fell over.

“H is for heavenly,” she’d continued, “R is for rich—in the  _ love from others _ . Not even the good kind of rich! D is for—“

“Okay, cut it out,” Zethrid had snarled, knocking the laptop out of her hands, uncaring as it smashed into the floor, glass from the screen flying everywhere. 

“Alright, geez,” Ezor had said, rubbing at her wrist. He thinks Matt had cried a little—the laptop had been a gift from his sister. Zethrid had told him to stop fucking whining, and that if he had a problem with her he should do something about it or shut up.

Matt, who was taller than Keith but nowhere near as tall as Zethrid, had shut up. 

That’s how it had been. They all tolerated each other, and did their jobs, and no one told anyone shit. He never knew any of the general’s names, and he doesn’t think he ever will. He tries to find it in him to care, but all he can see is Zethrid yanking Pidge up off the ground and laughing when she tried to kick at her, and can’t. 

He’ll kill them, whether or not they have names. 

 

They all think he’s dead, and it shows. They have Zethrid running a high security prison. Or maybe Zethrid has Zethrid running a high security prison because she’s a weird fucking person who likes having authority and using it to do whatever the hell she wants, he doesn’t know. He does know that it’s infamous — La Sante Prison in Paris, France, with high rise buildings and a VIP section. He reads about it on his way there —it’s number twelve on the Fifty Craziest Prisons and Jails in the World list—and yes, he thinks, this is exactly the kind of place she would work. She hates following rules, but she loves enforcing them. 

The fact that he knows exactly where she is--the fact that she wants people to know the power she has--is proof that they all think he’s dead. If they knew he was alive, well—he’d hope that they knew him well enough to hide. 

Highest security prison, he thinks with a laugh, scaling the wall of one of the buildings surrounding it. He’s honestly surprised she’s not with the mafia or something. She’d do better as a mob boss. 

He crouches low against the side of the building, guns hooked onto his belt. In the end, he finds her from the sound of her voice. She’s yelling about something — he follows the sound as quickly as he can without making too much noise himself, dropping down onto the ground and keeping close to the wall; all the guard posted along this side have been dealt with already, but he still needs to be safe — and throwing things at the staff. It hits him somewhere hard in his chest — she and Ezor used to have a field day throwing shit at the crew or employees of wherever they were staying. 

He watches, heart hammering in his chest, as she ends her rampage, gestures to the building he was hiding on five minutes ago and says deal with it. He almost smiles. She knows something is off. Part of him hopes that maybe, just a little bit, she knows he’s coming.

She’s the one who taught him how to get his arms around someone’s neck and squeeze until the weren’t moving anymore. They were hardly ever sent out together, because Lotor had his group and Keith had his and he didn’t like her very much anyways, but he uses the trick she taught him to get past the guards at her office door.

Maybe it’s poetic. 

He slips in quietly. She’s waiting for him, machine gun propped up on her desk. She doesn’t look truly surprised until he pulls off his mask.

“Paladin,” she says, her gravelly voice low. He could almost feel proud of himself, if he didn’t remember that same voice saying get the little one, or just blow the place up, I don’t see the big deal, while he was on the floor bleeding to death. 

“Come on,” he says, “I know you know my name. You owe me that much.”

She frowns, “I don’t owe you shit.”

“You owe me four years of my life. You owe me all of yours.”

Her grip on her gun tightens minutely. “It was a job,” she says, “Like every other job.”

“It was  _ Shiro _ ,” he snarls, “It was me.” 

She says nothing. She is a cruel person by nature, but she says nothing.

“You should’ve killed me when you had the chance,” he says. 

He draws his gun, she fires, he is small and he moves quick because of it. She is stronger than him, but he is running on four years of hatred and anger, and so he is the one who comes out on top. 

On the cab back to the hotel he’s staying at, a few blocks away, he crosses another name off the list. 

He stares out the window, watching all the cars passing by and the tourists crowding the sidewalks like ants, and hopes he can see the Eiffel Tower from his hotel window. 

 

They pick he and Shiro up at the Garrison. Matt, too, moreso. It’s where they meet. 

It’s not the cliche,  _ oh no I dropped my papers in the hallway _ kind of first love. Keith first meets Shiro because he decked a kid in the face and broke him nose and refused to apologize for it--the asshole had started it, anyways, going on about how it was Keith’s fault that he was getting a shit grade, like it was Keith’s fault he was so shitty at hand-to-hand combat he lost every time. If anything, Keith was just proving a point. He wasn’t going to apologize for that.

They send him to Takashi Shirogane, the youngest senior officer in the history of the Garrison, their very own Pride and Joy. At that point in his life, on the edge of seventeen and scrappy and angry and hungry for something more than what he had, Keith feels more like a force of nature than a person most of the time, something raw and too big for his body. Shiro is more of a person than a force of nature, any kind of force at all, but he can still do things that nobody else can do. He makes Keith feel small and nervous and excited. They clash, and they melt together. 

They spar together every Friday night without fail. Sometimes Matt tags along because he has nothing else to do, and he’s still waiting for the day that Keith will ‘finally kick Shiro’s ass’. Because he’s Shiro, back then. It what everybody calls him, it’s a kind nickname for a kind person, and something easier for people to say. 

Keith has an exam on Monday, a big one. He’s coiled tight and high strung and needs to burn off this energy before he explodes with it, so they go harder than they usually would. 

Keith doesn’t fight the way they teach here, all rigid and calculated. He fights like he fought older kids at the homes when he was younger, punches the way his dad taught him to at five years old before he drove away and never came back. Shiro says that it leaves him too open, not precise enough to defend himself well, always tells him that he’s too focused on getting a hit in than trying not to get hit. Shiro is usually right. Tonight, he is not.

They’ve sparred enough times that Keith can almost always tell when Shiro is going to punch for real and when it’s a feint. He always makes sure to look in the direction he’s going to trick you into thinking he’s gonna hit, and then moves the other way. He never has to look when he’s gonna hit for real. 

Shiro feints, but Keith is ready for it. He catches his arm in the act, get his feet out from under him and leans forwards and pulls. Shiro moves with him, body flipping, and lands with a surprised sound flat on his back. He blinks up at him, too shocked to react as Keith pins him down. 

He looks up at him for one moment, two, before he seems to get over whatever it is he’s caught in and tries to twist Keith off of him. Keith doesn’t let him, buzzing full of enough energy that he doesn’t think he could handle being stopped. He gets Shiro on his stomach, a knee pressed into his back. 

Shiro laughs, of all things, breathless, and only tries to squirm free twice before he taps out. Keith holds him down for a few moments longer than he probably should, and lets him up.

Matt whistles, and Keith smiles, elated and proud of himself. Shiro looks proud of him, too.

“Did I just witness Mister Takashi Shirogane get his ass beat by a cadet?” Matt asks loudly, slapping Shiro on the back.

“You did,” Keith answers for him, looking at Shiro. “How’s that for ‘too open’?”

“Keith, my friend,” Matt says, throwing an arm over his sweaty shoulder, “You are a legend, now. Today is a new national holiday. We have to celebrate it every year.”

“Fuck off, Holt,” Shiro says, laughing. 

“National ‘the day Shiro got his ass handed to him’ Day!” Matt continues, waving his free arm around, “I think we should celebrate it right now.” 

Shiro looks at him in question, like he’s considering it. 

Keith, hyped up on adrenaline and how good it feels to finally win, says, “Only if Shiro’s paying.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Matt says. “We’re best friends, now.”

Keith doesn’t really believe him, because Matt says a lot of things he doesn’t mean, but Shiro drives the three of them to town and Matt sneaks him a few shots even though he’s underage and they look at the stars and talk about the best way to punch someone and why the Star Wars prequels are garbage, and it feels like a beginning of something. 

It is also the end of something, because three years later they’re recruited to join a league of fucking assassins and they’re all stupid enough to do it, because they’re young and dumb enough to think they can do anything and desperate enough for money and some kind of purpose that they’ll kill for it. 

Keith put Shiro down flat on his back in the gym and Shiro blinked up at him like he had a fucking epiphany from God himself and then Keith fell in love with him, and maybe that is where they went wrong.

 

Ezor was always closest to Zethrid out of Lotor’s four generals. You hardly ever saw one without the other, and if you did, the other would find their way over within a few minutes. 

Keith holds off on buying another plane ticket for the next few days. He orders in and turns the TV on and keeps his gun strapped to his ankle and his blade in his hand, and he waits. 

Ezor comes to him. 

He’s not surprised that she found him so fast. She’s always been good at the espionage side of things, could blend in and stand out however she wanted. She was a fun person to be around, when she wasn’t stabbing people or throwing shit. She reminded Keith of Lance in a vaguely fucked up way. Lance would probably hate the comparison, Keith thinks, listening to the sound of his front lock being picked. Especially since she was the one that stabbed him. 

Thinking about Lance makes him sad, which makes him angry, which makes him grip the handle of his blade a little tighter, lean forwards a little more. Ezor shouldn’t have come. 

“You’re alive,” she says, swinging the door shut quietly behind her, feet soundless on the carpet. She’s dressed like a french business woman, colorful hair tied up and tamed. She used to let it roam wild. 

“I am.”

“You killed her.”

“I gave her exactly what she deserved.” Keith says cooly. Ezor has big eyes. They looked right into his while he yelled his heart out on the church floor as she covered the walls in his friends’ blood. 

“I could’ve killed you,” she says, cutting him off when he starts to scoff, “In the hospital. I was the only one who knew where you were, who knew you were alive. I could’ve killed you.”

“Why didn’t you?” He asks, curious despite himself. A commercial jingle on the TV plays in the silence. 

“I don’t know,” she says. “I was going to. I was gonna turn your oxygen off and just—walk away. Solve our problem.”

“You’re great at that. You should’ve done that.”

“I know,” she says, and then, softer, “As soon as I heard she was dead, I knew it was you.” 

“So you know what’s coming for you.” He says. Her eyes harden. 

“I’m going to kill you this time,” she says. 

“You’re going to try.” he corrects, because they both know it’s true, and they both know who’s going to live and who’s going to die, “You’re going to try.” 

 

When Keith sleeps, he dreams about a lot of things. He used to dream about his father, the little snatches of memory he had of him, and the mother he couldn’t remember at all. He used to wonder what they would think of him, in the Garrison and then with the Galra, used to wonder if they would be proud of him or if they would hate him for what he became without them. He doesn’t think about his parents at all anymore. Instead, he dreams of how it was Before.

He splits his life into Before and After. He’s living in the After, with the legs that took weeks to get working again and his list and nothing else. When he sleeps, he lives in Before.

He dreams about Allura laughing and wrapping him up tight when he tells her Takashi proposed, about Lance at the Garrison, all headstrong and hell-bent on winning in a one-sided rivalry. Keith hadn’t known who he was until Matt introduced them. When he told Lance this, he’d been pissed, and didn’t talked to him for a week. Keith didn’t care back then. They matured as they got older. Lance welcomed he and Shiro right back into his life when they fled from the Galra. Keith wishes he hadn’t. He wishes they had told him. 

He dreams about watching Hunk play the piano for the first and last time, and about he and Pidge going on and on about something only they could understand. It used to drive him crazy, not knowing, but now he justs finds it — found it — endearing. 

Mostly, he dreams about their wedding day. 

Allura dressed up so nicely it looked like she was supposed to be the bride. Hunk in his cute little bowtie, Coran looking like he should be running a fifties radio station in his ancient suit. Even Professor Holt had come. Keith hadn’t seen him in ages, and neither had Shiro. He was doing well for himself, especially since he’d retired. He hugged both of them tight and told them ‘I’m glad you made it out’. 

“You look so nice,” Allura tells him, the two of them standing near the window; she fixes his collar and straightens his tie. “I’m serious, you do. Something right out of a magazine.”

“Okay, Miss Thousand Dollar Dress,” he says. She swats him when he tries to fix his hair again.

“You look nice,” she repeats. “You’ve never cared about your looks before. What are you worried about?”

Keith bites his lip, fiddling with the sleeves of his suit, “I don’t know. I just. What if he’s making a mistake?”

Allura’s face softens, “He’s not.”

“But what if he is? I don’t — I don’t have anything good to give him. It’s just me.”

“You’re all he wants, Keith. He knows who you are.” she says gently, hands on his shoulders. “Trust me. If he was marrying for money, I wouldn’t be here giving my blessing, would I?”

Keith huffs a laugh, “You’re not the pastor, you know.”

“I know,” she rolls her eyes, “But I trust you. And he loves you.”

“I know he does,” Keith nods. 

“And you love him.” she smiles, kaleidoscope eyes lighting up, “So enjoy your wedding. You’ll be fine.” 

“Thanks, Allura,” he tells her, and she gives him a quick peck on the cheek and goes to make fun of Lance somewhere, and that is the last time he speaks to her. 

The real wedding hasn’t even started, yet. People are getting settled down and Keith is meeting Shiro’s eyes from across the room and Shiro smiles like he’s just seen the sun for the first time and Keith is going to meet him in the middle and that is when the first gunshot rings out. Somebody screams. That is the last time he sees Shiro smile.

Keith wakes up screaming. 

 

Before he makes his list, before he makes a plan, before he even finds Kolivan again and gets a new blade, he has to get his legs working again. He does it alone, in the back seat of the gross nurse’s truck. As soon as he works up enough willpower, massaging the muscles hard enough to hurt, to be able to move his feet and bend his legs, he crawls slowly into the front seat and does his very best to drive away before anyone finally comes looking for him.

He has to use both feet to drive, a foot on each pedal, and he almost crashes like four times, but he makes it to some fast food place, digs enough change out of the seat cushions to buy something small, and spends the rest of the day in the parking lot, trying to get his legs to get with the fucking program and realize he’s not in a fucking coma anymore. 

As soon as he can stand up, he decides he needs new clothes, some actual money, and a long, hot shower. He does all of these things with a howling in his chest, a creature that is out for blood. He mollifies it, tells it that it will get what it wants. He thinks of Shiro, and his friends, and he dreams, and he begins to think. 

 

He finds out that Mrs. Holt is still living in the same house.

It’s a nice little thing, in a nice little town of the coast of California. Far enough away from the Garrison for the professor to have some breathing room, but close enough that it won’t take him long to get there if they really need him. 

He drives by a few times, all different days, to avoid suspicion. She still lives in the same house. She lives there all alone. He wonders how she can stand it.

Four days after he got to Cali, and he still doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know how much she knows about what happened to her family. She couldn’t make it to the wedding — business trip, or something, or pre-existing plans she couldn’t get out of but sent a bouquet and plenty of well wishes. She wonders if she hates them for inviting the rest of her family to their deaths. He wonders if she’ll even want to see him.

He tries anyways, because he needs to find the bastards who did this to both of them like he needs to breathe, and Mr. Holt’s information might be the only thing that can help him do that. 

He pulls his jacket on, gathers all the courage he has left in his empty little heart, and knocks on the front door. He’s doing this for all of them, he thinks. He has to.

The door swings open, and Mrs. Holt stares at him like she’s seeing a ghost. She thought he was dead, too. 

“Keith,” she says, voice small and breathless. He hasn’t heard anyone say his name in so long. The sound of it makes him want to cry.

“Mrs. Holt,” he says, voice cracking on her name. “I—”

“You’re alive,” she says, and she’s pulling him inside and shutting the door and holding him against her frail chest. “You’re alive,” she repeats, pulling back and looking at him, taking him in, “Does this mean — is anyone else? Are they—?”

God, he thinks, this was a mistake. He bites his lip, shakes his head slowly. Her face falls. This was a mistake.

“I was,” he clears his throat, “I just barely woke up. I was in a coma. Nobody knew who I was.”

“All this time…?”

“Yeah,” he says. She seems so old. There are lines on her face she didn’t have before. He has to look away.

“You just barely lost them,” she says, voice heavy. “Keith, I’m —“

“I’m sorry,” he interrupts, “I’m sorry I — it’s my fault. It’s my fault they’re dead.”

He feels her tense up, but she doesn’t let go of him. He feels like he might fall to his knees if she did, like she’s the only thing holding him up. 

“Why are you here?” she asks, eyes searching.

He takes a breath. “If you still have them,” he knows she will, “I’d like to…go through your husband’s notes. His research. I know it’s insensitive, and I’m sorry, and if you don’t want me here I understand.”

He finally looks up at her again. Her mouth is pressed into a hard line. He knows it is so she doesn’t cry. He wonders if he looks the same way.

“My husband,” she says, “He was involved in things, wasn’t he? Bad things. It’s why he--why all of them died.”

He nods.

“You’re looking for the ones who did this?”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to kill them.” It isn’t a question. 

“Yes,” Keith repeats. 

She looks at him for another long moment, stronger than she should have ever had to be, and nods. “Good. My husband’s office is in the back.”

He breathes a sigh of relief, and follows her. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> honestly?? i can't tell if i like this or not so drop a comment to tell me what you think


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